Claire Denis Talks France’s New Abortion Rights Protection; Judith Godrèche’s #MeToo Campaign & Upcoming Africa-Set Feature
deadline.comFrench director Claire Denis is set to return to West Africa for her next feature film, an adaptation of late French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1980 work Black Battles With Dogs (Combat de nègre et de chiens). “It’s a play written by a friend of mine a long time ago and directed by Patrice Chéreau on stage in the 80s.
He was dying from AIDS and he wanted me to make a film out of it,” Denis told Deadline on the fringes of the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra meeting in Qatar.
She is planning to film in either Senegal or Cameroon. Denis grew up in West Africa and set a number of her early films in the region, such as Chocolat (1988) and Beau Travail (1989).
This will be her first major fiction feature shot on the African continent since the 2009 drama White Material, starring Isabelle Huppert as a coffee plantation owner caught up in a violent revolution. “Bernard wrote it after an experience he had in Nigeria on a construction site.
Read more on deadline.com
